Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:14th Mar '96
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Explores the importance of heterosexual masculine identity in Renaissance literature and culture.
The importance of heterosexual masculine identity in Renaissance culture is explored through the work of a wide range of writers, including Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Burton, and Jane Anger. Mark Breitenberg traces masculine anxiety as both a problem and a productive force in the perpetuation of patriarchal ideologies.To recent studies of Renaissance subjectivity, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England contributes the argument that masculinity is unavoidably anxious and volatile in cultures that distribute power and authority according to patriarchal prerogatives. Drawing from current arguments in feminism, cultural studies, historicism, psychoanalysis and gay studies, Mark Breitenberg explores the dialectic of desire and anxiety in masculine subjectivity in the work of a wide range of writers, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Burton and the women writers of the 'querelles des femmes' debate, especially Jane Anger. Breitenberg discusses jealousy and cuckoldry anxiety, hetero and homoerotic desire, humoural psychology, anatomical difference, cross-dressing and the idea of honour and reputation. He traces masculine anxiety both as a sign of ideological contradiction and, paradoxically, as a productive force in the perpetuation of western patriarchal systems.
"The book is deeply grounded in current approaches to gender and culture, and it contributes usefully to those discussions." B.E. Brandt, Choice
"In Anxious Masculinity Mark Breitenberg has done a superb job of elucidating and untangling numerous of the elements and contradictions of the early modern sex-gender system." Michael M. Holmes, Essays in Theatre
"In Anxious Masculinity Mark Breitenberg has done a superb job of elucidating and untangling numerous of the elements and contradictions of the early modern sex-gender system....The evr deepening comprehension of the ways in which early modern people worried about, debated, and acted upon inequality, validates Breitenberg's salutary sense of the human ability to contest norms and resist coercion." Michael M. Holmes,Essays in Theatre
ISBN: 9780521485883
Dimensions: 228mm x 152mm x 14mm
Weight: 341g
236 pages